Understanding who your customers are and what they need and want is at the heart of successful marketing strategies. In this course you will explore how to identify and classify customers and the different methods that marketing professionals use to shed light on how they make purchase decisions.
The course will cover the following:
1. Marketing Fundamentals
2. Product, Pricing and Channel Decisions
3. Building Strong Brands
4. Communication Strategy

MP

Content wise its very rich and a good course for marketing student...must learn from this course.

AA

Nov 18, 2016

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The course is well detailed thought by well vast and experience teacher in Mario Capizzani.

À partir de la leçon

Week 4: Communication Strategy

Once a company has a good grasp of its customers, it can now develop a communication strategy to appeal directly to their interests and needs. In this session I will introduce a framework that will show you how to organize your communication strategy in order to successfully launch a product or service. We will also discuss what the objectives and target market of that strategy should be. Mapping the decision-making process is also key since you will need to learn to adapt the message and content to each stage of the customer journey. Objective: To define the elements and list the steps for building a sound communication strategy.

Enseigné par

Mario Capizzani

Lecturer

Transcription

[MUSIC] Good, now that we have selected who the actual target is for our communication campaign, let's make sure that we map what the decision making process or the customer journey is. This is what a typical customer journey looks like. As you can imagine, it first begin with the customer recognizing the problem. Typically at this point, you may have already a set of preconceived alternatives. Next, you might conduct some information search. Subsequent to which you will go on to the stage of evaluating alternatives and deciding on making a purchase decision. If a product has been successful, then you will go to repurchase, and, in which case, you will develop a loyalty loop. If you're not happy with the experience, you going to back typically to the information search stage, or to evaluate alternatives once again. So, the first thing I have identified the target is to be able to draw the consumer journey for the particular product or service that I am about to launch. But in addition to mapping the customer decision journey, you also want to identify all the customers touch points and the different experiences that you might go through, positive or negative under different encounters to make sure that I design the proper content and communication strategy to try to improve our point of experiences. Let's assume that you found out that you're about to have the third kid. Most couples that have the third kid need to upgrade cars, as typically three car seats do not fit properly in a standard sedan car. So you might go into a bigger car. What are the different ups and downs that a customer through that decision journey might actually encounter? First, for example, you receive the news that you're expecting a third baby, right? This would certainly qualify at as a very in joyful piece of news, right? That would be positive. Immediately, you would think about, shoot, we will need a new car. You realize you need a bigger car, that would probably count as a negative experience. After which, you will get into the fun process of trying to realize of researching cars. For most people, that might actually be quite an enjoyable experience. But then, you need to also research financial alternatives if you're going to get financing for the car. Certainly not a very fun process, especially if you have to read the small print. Then, you have to sign the contract, let's say this party is neutral, and finally you get the keys to your new car. This will be probably the most enjoyable part of the later stage of this process. So as you can see, realizing all these different touch points and the emotional roller coaster that somebody will go through, will give you plenty of opportunities to target the right communication messages at the different stages. Next, we move on to our last example. Let's assume that you're in the market for a new home, a customizable home in Mexico. What do you think if you are a first time buyer of a new home, perhaps because you're expecting family for the first time? What are the different concerns that might actually be hitting you at this particular point once you entered the daunting process of having to go and look for a new home? Perhaps designing elements of it yourself. You can imagine everything that is going on in a person's mind when trying to go through this process for the first time, and most likely the only time in your life. It's a very high involvement decision, it is very complex, right. You need to decide on styles, floor plans, construction materials, finishings. A whole and big and fit catalog of different materials and finishings and particular elements that you might want to have inside the house. It's a very complex decision, and as you can imagine, there is plenty of confusion in experience and even maybe fear. So take the company side, for example, what should be the objective of the communication campaign with all this that is going on inside a customers head, right? If you're in the business of building customizable homes and promoting them, perhaps the objective of your communication program should stress a couple of these points. First of all, you might want to become a one stop shop. You might want to try both finding a land, the construction, the design, and if you possibly can, solving the financing problem for this particular customer to make sure that he doesn't find more roadblocks in the purchase process. In addition, you may want to stress out that you're a national brand, present all over the country, and that you have been around for a long time, through the ups and downs of the economic cycle. As a lot of small builders will typically go out of business during a crisis, in which case the customer may have concern about the warranties on construction. Finally, you may offer a full catalog with set models of homes to help or speed up the decision making process, or you may want to stress out that your price is non-negotiable. In a sense that, once you choose the floor plan, the model, and the finishing, the price is set. A lot of people already seen this process complex enough, and they're inexperienced, and it's really very daunting. The possibility of cost running more than they had anticipated and then the house not being delivered on time. So actually competing by having fixed prices, once the model, size and finishing are set might actually be a very good idea and one that you might really want to communicate. And the objective of it, is to ease the pain that a new customer into the home market might be facing once having to face perhaps one of the most important decisions in their life. [MUSIC]